


like shadow following

by meritmut



Series: i loved you well, when we were young [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Hunting, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-09
Updated: 2013-01-09
Packaged: 2017-11-24 07:06:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/631758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One leads the other on a chase through the wood, but the hunter is armed with only his wits and the prey - well, she is Sif, and she was born for this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like shadow following

Scarcely ten yards ahead of him and a little to the right, a branch quivers. Loki’s head snaps up like a hound’s on the scent.

The movement stills. Likely it was only a bird alighting from its perch but he is already away, shifting beneath the dipping branches like a ghost in the wake of the elusive quarry, somewhere ahead of him in the trees. 

If he can just catch a glimpse of her again -

Pale yellow sunshine filters through the snowy pines in watery streams, winter light glints off polished steel (or is it only ice?) and he quickens his pace through the wood.

She’s close, he can feel it, and soon she is near enough that he can half-see movement again.

-

Sometimes she’s visible only by the trailing banner of her long hair in its charcoal braid, sometimes by no more than the tremble of a branch or the fleeting flash of something darker beyond the white trees, but Loki follows the signs she leaves as straight and true as a shadow - _her_ shadow, silent and swift with a patient smile on his pale mouth and paler fingers curling around the empty space at his side where normally his slender knives would wait.

Even the smallest blade, a nimble little thing that in his hands could bend the air itself to find its victim, had been left at home. That had been the rule.

The only rule, but still. Sif wears her lightest leathers and bears a single weapon of her own choosing, but Loki? He must go without arms or armour to see if he may catch her through his own means. He knows not the weapon she chose but he suspects her smallest axe, fatal in her clenched hand and deadlier still out of it, scything between hairline spaces to find its mark without hesitation or error.

She wouldn’t pause, not even for him, he knows that. Her blood was up when they parted the night before, and there’s too much of the wild in her.

He pushes past the press of her in his head, the raw instincts stretched taut as bowstrings, ever on edge, ever drawn, every sense quivering with anticipation and expectation and _not his_. She's so close, her mind a taunting brush against him. A single sound and she’ll be on him, claiming for herself the title _huntress_.

Well, perhaps, anyway. He doubts she’d want to spoil the game so soon.

Besides, there’s only a prize if _he_ wins. If he loses - if she catches him, rather than the other way around - her tantalising reward will so easily become a punishment. She knows how to push him beyond bearing with her fiendish tortures, how to keep him so completely in her power.

-

Then again, he muses, long legs bending into a crouch to scan the lower forest floor to see if he can spy her legs through the foliage, wherever was it written that forfeits must needs be painful? He wouldn’t even mind the pain so much, if there wasn’t the issue of his pride at stake.

A faint rustle from above - he looks up just in time to follow with his eyes the inevitable trajectory of the enormous pine-cone as it hurtles from nowhere to strike him hard between the brows. Groaning, he straightens and slips away beneath a sharp barrage of cones raining down from above, his gaze directed firmly upwards now.

_She’s in the trees._

-

Clever of her, he concedes as he works a hasty cloak of seiðr about himself and vanishes from the sight of spirits and men - and more importantly, from Sif.

After a few moments' walking he lets the smile he’s been hiding cross his features, even a chuckle (hastily stifled, lest she find him again and renew her surprisingly vicious assault). He imagines her perched on a sturdy bough, legs curled to hook herself into place as both hands launch makeshift missiles down upon him, beaming like a maid with a new robe as she discovers yet another thing she can weaponise against him. She’s yet to find something she _can’t_ make lethal…but perhaps that’s just what happens, Loki reasons, when ordinary objects come into contact with a body that has crafted itself over millennia into its own suit of armour, its own blade and shield…perhaps it’s no different to his own ability to enchant his surroundings.

 _This is far enough now,_ he decides. Cautiously he turns to double back on himself, looping around to hopefully come up behind her and catch her unawares.

-

The snowy canopy is unmarked and unoccupied by the time Loki circles back to roughly where he’d been when the aerial attack began; above is only white, the trees glittering and the sky bleached a wan grey, streaks of a warm silvery light where the sun penetrates the cloud cover.

So Sif is gone, but her footsteps remain, patterned here and there on the ground as if she’d skipped across the tiny patch of exposed earth - and then disappeared, taking her prints with her. Loki stands some distance from the tree she must’ve sat in to hurl the pine-cones down at him, but it’s here that the footprints seem to vanish. Did she climb here and then jump? Leap from pine to soaring pine to throw him off her trace when she descended? Improbable, given how slippery and sharp the branches look from here, and yet it seems so. There are no prints leading away from this little clearing. She must’ve left the ground here.

Or…

She gives Loki only a split second to realise the other possibility - that the footsteps never leave the clearing because _she’d_ never left - before, on the other side of the great tree by which he stands, she throws herself bodily at the lowest-hanging branch and sends its entire blanket of heavy snow collapsing over her erstwhile hunter with a soft, satisfying _crump_.

-

Somewhere under the shifting avalanche Sif hears a muffled curse and dissolves into laughter, dusting the snow from her hands onto her knees as Loki unleashes a stream of invective in her general direction.

She sees movement under the mound and dives for it to hammer home her victory over him (oh, and how _sweet_ this forfeit of his will be), to force a surrender from him by any means necessary, but the chance slips from her grasp as she falls into Loki’s own - his hands close about her wrists as she seeks him in the snow and quite suddenly - after a flurrying struggle of kicking and swearing - he’s above her, and she is neatly pinned.

She kicks a moment more, rolls her eyes and gives a weary sigh.

One long-fingered hand slides down to seize her by the throat and press her closer to the ground, as Loki tilts his head to take in her empty grip.

“No blade? No weapon at all?”

“None. I need none,” she half-spits up at him, grinning.

Not with pine-cones and snowdrifts at her disposal. Her remorseless smile says as much and Loki tightens his hold on her, drawing her other hand up over her head and flattening it against the snow. Their fingers twine together but the cold barely registers in his senses, overwhelmed by the furnace of her body against his and that murder-mirth in her hooded eyes. Her defeat stings her, that look tells him, but she’s not out of ideas just yet.

“That smacks of pride, my lady,” he cautions with a warning grin of his own, releasing her neck and leaning back. “And considering you just _lost_ , I think it’s pride unwarranted. To come unarmed…" He tuts disapprovingly, "foolish.”

“I did not say unarmed,” she responds, her smile more of a smirk now, “only that I bear no weapon. And you know why I don’t need one?”

She raises her head a little until her lips brush close to his, dark and soft in the corner of his mouth, her breath a hot little blaze over his skin and her eyes igniting a hard-to-ignore sense of urgency right where he hasn't a hope of hiding it from her. Unconsciously he moves to follow, to bring her closer - but then that wicked smile returns and she pulls back, her presence no more than an intoxicating murmur on the edge of his awareness.

 _Because you are one,_ he thinks, dazed.

-

With a jerk of her head (one that has him instinctively rearing back, having far too much experience with her nose-breaking abilities) Sif swings her hips and catches him at just the right moment to roll them both over. She splays him out beneath her, traces kisses softer than shadows across the exposed skin of his throat with a tenderness so at odds with her former aggression that it robs him of breath and leaves him digging his fingers, still clasped between her own, into the ground.

His nails carve crescents and furrows into the snow so deep that Sif herself can barely feel her hands - only the vague knowledge that they’re there above her, pressed into the snow and the knotted grass beneath, and when she lifts them to pull the furs and the jerkin and the tunic from Loki’s shoulders - to bare him to the elements he seems oblivious to - his eyes fly open at the startling chill of her skin and a slow smile curves across his lips when she leans down to tease whatever naked flesh she can lay her mouth upon with a slow warmth, a dizzying contrast to the winter world that has become hunting ground and bedchamber by turns today.

-

Shivers run down his spine as she draws her nails along his arms and tangles her hands with his own again.


End file.
